On the morning of September 3, 1809, with a carriage waiting at the door to take her to Bayreuth, the departing housekeeper of the magistrate Gebhard at Sanspareil picked up his baby, an infant of five months, and fed the child a biscuit soaked in milk, then let it drink the milk that was left. She had already given each of the two maids, Hazin and Waldmann, a cup of coffee sweetened with sugar she took from a twist of paper. She kissed the child goodbye and climbed into the carriage Gebhard had paid for, carrying a crown dollar and some chocolate he had given her as a parting present. Within half an hour the baby was vomiting violently. Within a few hours both maids were ill in the same way.
For the first time anyone in the house suspected her. The servants told Gebhard that on her last evening the housekeeper had carried the kitchen salt box into the servants' hall, which was no part of her work, and refilled it from a barrel of salt that stood in his bedroom, joking that when departing servants filled the salt box the others kept their places longer. Gebhard had the salt box analyzed by a chemist, who found a large quantity of arsenic in it. When the barrel itself was tested for the trial it held thirty grains of arsenic to every three pounds of salt. Other things now came out. People recalled guests and servants falling ill after eating or drinking in the two households she had served before Gebhard's. And the name she went by, Nanette Schönleben, turned out to be only her maiden name. She was the widow of a Nuremberg notary named Zwanziger.
Her months in Gebhard's house had been full of sickness that nobody connected to her. On August 25 a shopman named Beck and the widow Alberti dined there and spent the rest of the day and much of the night vomiting and doubled with cramps. Around the same time the messenger Rosenhauer was put to bed after a drink she gave him, and his porter, Johann Kraus, nineteen, fell sick after a glass of brandy she poured for him in the cellar; he had noticed a white sediment in it and left most of it. Barbara Waldmann, a maid she had quarreled with, vomited every half hour for a day after a cup of coffee. On September 1 Gebhard sent to his own cellar for beer while playing skittles with friends, and he and five others were taken ill, some badly enough to need a doctor. The next day, pressed by one of the men who had drunk with him, he dismissed her, though he still gave her a written character for honesty and fidelity. That was where matters stood when she gave the baby his milk.
Behind her lay three deaths. In 1807 she had been living at Pegnitz, in the Bayreuth territory, a widow of nearly fifty supporting herself by knitting, and her good name there led Justice Wolfgang Glaser of Kasendorf to take her on as his housekeeper in March 1808. Feuerbach's case history, the fullest account, gives the day in one place as March 5 and in another as March 25. Glaser, a man past fifty, had lived apart from his wife for several years, and his new housekeeper set about reconciling them, partly without his knowledge. She wrote secretly to Frau Glaser at her brother's house in Grieshaber, wrote to family friends asking for their help, and sent money to the Catholic priest at Hollfeld asking him to say a mass for the success of the reunion, though she herself was a Protestant. On July 22, 1808, Glaser brought his wife home to a house she had decorated for the occasion, the floors strewn with flowers, garlands on the doorposts, and on the wreathed bed a sheet of paper bearing a couplet in her own hand: The widow's hand hath joined this band.
She later confessed what the welcome had been for. She expected Glaser to marry her once his wife was dead, and she wanted, as she put it, to make her old age comfortable. On August 13 or 14 she stirred half a teaspoon of arsenic into tea standing by the fire and gave it to Frau Glaser, who vomited soon afterward. On August 15, between four and five in the afternoon, she dissolved a large dessert spoonful of tartar emetic in a cup of coffee and invited Frau Glaser into her room to drink it. The vomiting and pain began that night and grew worse each day, and Frau Glaser, a strong and healthy woman, died on August 26, a month after the reconciliation. "Lord Jesus! this time she must surely die," Zwanziger recalled thinking as she saw how thick the mixture was. A week before the first attempt a visitor named Wagenholz, his wife and their son had stayed to supper at the Glasers' and all three were taken sick, as was the watchman Harbach's son, who was given the leftovers the next day. She denied that one.
With Frau Glaser buried, Glaser did not propose, and on September 25, 1808, she moved to Sanspareil to keep house for Justice Grohmann, a large, unmarried man of thirty-eight who had suffered from gout for years and was often in bed. She nursed him with great attention and kept others away from his bedside. Two messengers who did errands about the house, Lawrence and Johann Dorsch, annoyed her by teasing her and drinking too much beer, so she prepared four pitchers, two laced with tartar emetic and two with arsenic, meaning, she said, only to make them sick. They disliked the taste and drank little, and she left the poisoned pitchers unmarked in the cellar among the good ones. A visiting justice, Christopher Hoffmann of Wiesenfels, drank some flat beer at Grohmann's that spring and was vomiting by the time he reached Gebhard's house.
Grohmann, meanwhile, meant to marry the daughter of Justice Herrgott of Dachsbach. Witnesses said the housekeeper watched every letter that came from Dachsbach or went there. Grohmann told a visitor that she imagined every letter held an offer of marriage, and that old as she was she had taken it into her head that he would marry her. When word went round the house that the banns had been published and the bride was expected within eight days, her tongue and temper were thrown, in Feuerbach's account, into a state of extraordinary excitement. In the spring of 1809 Grohmann fell ill with symptoms unlike his gout: vomiting, stomach pain, inflammation of the mouth and throat, a thirst nothing satisfied. He died on May 8 after eleven days, his housekeeper filling the house with her grief. Everyone, the doctors included, took it for a natural death in a man who had long been ailing.
Gebhard's wife was about to give birth, and she asked the obliging housekeeper to come as her nurse. The baby was born on May 13, 1809, and both were well until the third day. On Wednesday, May 17, by her own confession, Zwanziger poisoned two pitchers of beer in the cellar, one with tartar emetic and one with a stronger dose of arsenic. Gebhard himself handed his wife the glass filled from the first. On Friday the second pitcher was set before her, and she drank a little. She died on May 20, seven days after the birth, crying out, as Feuerbach records it, "Merciful Heaven! you have given me poison!" She had always been sickly and had died in childbed, and her death raised no suspicion. Some people urged Gebhard not to keep the housekeeper on, saying three people she had served had died one after another, but they meant only that she seemed to carry bad luck. No one accused her of anything, and the widower, left with a household and a newborn, kept her.
Gebhard did not go to the authorities until September 29, nearly four weeks after she left, when he laid an information before the criminal court at Bayreuth. The court appointed its chief magistrate, Brater, who went at once to the scene, and the charges multiplied as he took statements. The question that mattered most was what had killed the three people she had served since 1808. On October 23 Frau Glaser's body was raised from the churchyard at Kasendorf. After fourteen months in the ground it was hardly decomposed, dried and hardened like a mummy, the skin the color of mahogany, the walls of the stomach turned to a substance like cheese. The next day the bodies of Frau Gebhard and of Grohmann, his after nearly six months in the ground, were exhumed and showed the same signs. Arsenic was found in the intestines of both women. In Grohmann's it was not detected, although his body bore every outward mark of it, and Feuerbach is not wholly consistent on the point, elsewhere citing traces of arsenic in his exhumed remains.
Zwanziger, unaware of any of this, was waiting to be called back. She had left Gebhard a letter reproaching him for his ingratitude and warning that if he asked after her six weeks later he would hear that she was no more. Then she wrote to him faithfully, from Bayreuth, where she lodged for a month with the mother of his dead wife, and later from Nuremberg, describing her health and her hopes of a new place and sending kisses to her darling child. She also wrote to Glaser offering to return as his housekeeper. When no recall came she went to Mainbernheim in Franconia, hoping to be taken in by her son-in-law, a bookbinder named Sauer. He had divorced her daughter, who was in the house of correction for theft and swindling, and he was celebrating his second wedding on the day she arrived. She went back to Nuremberg and was arrested there on October 18, 1809. In her pocket were two packets of tartar emetic and one of arsenic.
She was questioned at Kulmbach and at Nuremberg, and from October 19, 1809, to April 16, 1810, she denied every charge of poisoning. When the arsenic from her pocket was laid before her at Kulmbach to be identified, Feuerbach wrote, she seemed to tremble with pleasure and gazed at the powder with shining eyes. On April 16 she came before the examining judge composed, believing the evidence exhausted, and he opened by telling her that Frau Glaser had been exhumed and found to have been poisoned with arsenic, and that the strongest suspicion fell on her. He pressed the point for two hours. She wept, wrung her hands, protested, talked fast and incoherently, and at last confessed that she had twice given poison to Frau Glaser. In the same breath she accused Glaser of putting her up to it and of handing her the tartar emetic himself. Then she fell to the floor in convulsions and was carried from the room. Glaser was arrested on her word and examined, and the inquiry ended in his complete acquittal.
On May 24, 1810, Frau Gebhard's body was raised a second time and shown to her. She touched the right hand and said she wished she lay in the grave beside her. Led to Grohmann's grave, she declared that she had had nothing to do with his death or with Frau Gebhard's. Afterward she confessed to poisoning Frau Gebhard after all, claiming she had meant only to plague her for being cross with her about the housekeeping. Witnesses and letters found in her commode showed she had hoped to marry Gebhard, as she had hoped with Glaser and Grohmann before him.
What she admitted came in pieces, each trimmed to look smaller. She confessed poisoning Beck because he laughed at her, and said of watching people who had teased her fall sick that it was good fun. She admitted poisoning Rosenhauer, but with beer, not wine, and Kraus, but with beer, not brandy, insisting nobody could hide poison in anything as clear as brandy. She denied the skittle-ground beer, saying perhaps old sediment had stayed in the pitchers. On the evening before she left Gebhard's, a maid had washed a small earthen jar for her from the cellar and found a hard white crust an eighth of an inch thick in the bottom. She confessed putting arsenic in the kitchen salt box, so that everyone left in the house would get some and so that the maid would be blamed, but denied poisoning the barrel she had filled it from. For the baby she admitted only "the least bit" of tartar emetic in a cup of milk, a few spoonfuls, she said, given so that the baby would cry and fret and Gebhard would send for her to quiet it; the maid Hazin testified that the child drank nearly half a cup. Feuerbach's text gives the infant's age as both five and six months, and it records that the child fell violently ill but does not record a death; later retellings that count the baby among the dead go beyond that account. Of Grohmann she said he had probably drunk from the unmarked pitchers by accident. He was, she said, her best friend and her all in all. By the strict letter of the law, Feuerbach wrote, his deliberate poisoning was not proved.
The life she set down for her judges filled eighteen closely written folio sheets, and with witness testimony it gave the outline of how she came to Kasendorf. She was born Anna Margaretha Schönleben in Nuremberg on August 7, 1760, at the Black Cross, an inn kept by her father, who died eighteen months later. Before she was five she had lost her mother and her only brother. She was boarded with an old woman in Nuremberg, sent to an aunt at Feucht, then to a clergyman's widow, and at about ten was taken into the house of her guardian, a rich merchant, who gave her a sound education and saw her taught French and fine needlework. He arranged her marriage to a notary named Zwanziger, a man past thirty whom she disliked and avoided for a long time, and she married him in her nineteenth year. Bored and lonely, she read novels. Her first was The Sorrows of Young Werther, and she said that if she had owned a pistol she would have shot herself too.
Her inheritance went on dinners, concerts and balls, and when it was gone, with two children and a husband who often drank ten bottles of wine a day, she sold herself, by her own account only to men of rank and discretion. A lottery of watches her husband devised restored their fortunes for a while. An affair with a lieutenant led her to leave for Vienna and then to sue for divorce, which she won, and the day after the decree she married Zwanziger again. He died after a short illness on January 20, 1796, eighteen years into the marriage. According to Feuerbach she was suspected of poisoning him and the suspicion was not borne out; German reference works say instead that he died of the effects of drink and left her destitute.
The twenty years that followed she spent moving from place to place. She went to Vienna to set up as a confectioner, failed, kept house for several families, and had a child by a clerk in the Hungarian exchequer; she put the baby in the foundling hospital, where it soon died. Back in Nuremberg a Freiherr von W. kept her for a time, and when he cooled toward her she opened a vein in each arm with a borrowed lancet and later jumped into the Pegnitz with a sentimental novel in her pocket, to be pulled out by two fishermen. Feuerbach judged that neither attempt was meant to succeed. She blamed that man for the hardness of her heart. When she later did something wicked, she told her examiners, she said to herself that no one had ever pitied her, so she would show no pity to others. In 1804, working as a housemaid in Weimar, she walked out of the house of a chamberlain with a diamond ring, and when a newspaper advertisement named her as the thief her son-in-law turned her out after three days. From then on she called herself Schönleben. She taught needlework to girls in Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate for about a year, well liked by the town's magistrates, until a general she had attached herself to stopped answering her letters and refused to see her when she followed him to Munich. In 1807 she came to Pegnitz.
When she was arrested she was nearly fifty, small, thin and misshapen, her face sallow and deeply lined. Even under sentence of death she asked her judge not to judge what she had been by what she was now, because she had once been beautiful, exceedingly beautiful. In her memoirs she called her crimes slight errors and complained of the cruelty of those who would destroy her for such trifles. Anselm von Feuerbach, the jurist behind Bavaria's reformed penal code, made her case the opening of the first volume of his criminal histories drawn from the court files, published at Giessen in 1828. In the 1846 English translation the chapter is headed The German Brinvilliers, after the French poisoner executed in 1676. His reading of her was that poison had become a hidden power to a woman who had none, a way to punish slights, get rid of rivals and unwelcome guests, and make herself needed as a nurse, until she came to prize it for its own sake. Arsenic, he wrote, became her truest friend and constant companion. She herself never made a full confession, and he conceded that the record left her deeper reasons in the dark.
On July 7, 1811, the court at Bamberg sentenced her to be beheaded by the sword and her body then laid on the wheel. The king confirmed the death sentence and struck out the wheel. She heard the sentence without visible emotion and signed the papers with a steady hand. In the days left to her she told the judge that her death was fortunate for mankind, since she could not have given up poisoning. On the eve of the execution she wrote, in his presence, to a woman friend in Nuremberg: "The 17th of September is the day fixed for my death, on which I shall receive from God the reward of my actions." She asked the judge whether she might, if it were possible, appear to him after death to prove the soul immortal. At the last, when the staff was broken over her, she held a handkerchief to her face against the crowd and took polite leave of the officers of the court. The judge made one more appeal to her to clear Justice Glaser. She refused, still insisting he had shared in his wife's murder, and was beheaded on September 17, 1811, at fifty-one. German reference works give the place as Kulmbach.
August 7, 1760: Anna Margaretha Schönleben is born in Nuremberg.
January 20, 1796: her husband, the notary Zwanziger, dies after a short illness; Feuerbach says she was suspected of poisoning him and the suspicion was not borne out.
1804: working as a housemaid in Weimar, she walks out of a chamberlain's house with a diamond ring.
1807: she comes to Pegnitz.
March 1808: Justice Wolfgang Glaser of Kasendorf takes her on as his housekeeper; Feuerbach gives the day as March 5 and as March 25.
July 22, 1808: Glaser brings his wife home to a house she has decorated for the occasion.
August 26, 1808: Frau Glaser dies after the arsenic and tartar emetic Zwanziger later confessed to giving her.
September 25, 1808: she moves to Sanspareil to keep house for Justice Grohmann.
May 8, 1809: Grohmann dies after eleven days of illness; his deliberate poisoning is never proved by the strict letter of the law.
May 20, 1809: Frau Gebhard dies seven days after giving birth; Zwanziger later confesses to poisoning her.
September 1, 1809: Gebhard and five others fall ill after drinking beer from his cellar; the next day he dismisses her.
September 3, 1809: as she leaves, she feeds Gebhard's baby milk and gives the two maids coffee, and all three fall ill.
September 29, 1809: Gebhard lays an information before the criminal court at Bayreuth.
October 18, 1809: she is arrested in Nuremberg with two packets of tartar emetic and one of arsenic in her pocket.
October 23, 1809: Frau Glaser's body is exhumed at Kasendorf; the next day the bodies of Frau Gebhard and Grohmann are raised.
April 16, 1810: after denying every charge of poisoning, she confesses that she twice gave poison to Frau Glaser.
July 7, 1811: the court at Bamberg sentences her to be beheaded by the sword.
September 17, 1811: she is beheaded, at fifty-one.